Ready Player Two (Ready Player One #2)

by Ernest Cline

Except that most kids no longer referred to it as “reality.” They called it “the Earl.” (A term derived from the initialism IRL.)

My friend Kira always said that life is like an extremely difficult, horribly unbalanced videogame. When you’re born, you’re given a randomly generated character, with a randomly determined name, race, face, and social class. Your body is your avatar, and you spawn in a random geographic location, at a random moment in human history, surrounded by a random group of people, and then you have to try to survive for as long as you can. Sometimes the game might seem easy. Even fun. Other times it might be so difficult you want to give up and quit. But unfortunately, in this game you only get one life. When your body grows too hungry or thirsty or ill or injured or old, your health meter runs out and then it’s Game Over. Some people play the game for a hundred years without ever figuring out that it’s a game, or that there is a way to win it. To win the videogame of life you just have to try to make the experience of being forced to play it as pleasant as possible, for yourself, and for all of the other players you encounter in your travels. Kira says that if everyone played the game to win, it’d be a lot more fun for everyone.

I’d finally gained enough distance from my addiction to realize something. Human beings were never meant to participate in a worldwide social network comprised of billions of people.

a lyric from the 1987 song “Don’t Let’s Start” by They Might Be Giants: No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful….

Two-Face was right. You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

ONI technology is our best protection against other deadly pandemics like the one that killed your parents.

She probably hadn’t switched off any of her avatar’s other involuntary emotional responses either. Younger ONI users did this intentionally. They referred to it as “rolling real.”

You know what Bill Murray said about that? ‘When you become famous, you’ve got, like, a year or two where you act like a real asshole. You can’t help yourself. It happens to everybody. You’ve got, like, two years to pull it together—or it’s permanent.’

It’s cool to use the computer, don’t let the computer use you…. There is a war going on. The battlefield’s in the mind. And the prize is the soul. July 19, 1999

“That why I love it!” Art3mis replied. “Don’t yuck my yum, Aech.

Og once told an interviewer, “Jim always jokingly referred to Kira as Yoko, which infuriated me, because if we were Lennon and McCartney, then Kira was our George Harrison. She didn’t break up the Beatles. She was one of the Beatles! And without her help, we never would have had a single hit.”

The mind is the only thing about human beings that’s worth anything. Why does it have to be tied to a bag of skin, blood, hair, meat, bones and tubes? No wonder people can’t get anything done, stuck for life with a parasite that has to be stuffed with food and protected from weather and germs all the time. And the fool thing wears out anyway—no matter how much you stuff and protect it! —Kurt Vonnegut Jr.